In the interest of full disclosure: This is a collage of “a” day – just not “today”.

That’s because it is too cold to be hanging out in the studio for the moment, and also because I am going to spend the day at Kahve Dünyası (Coffee World) using their free Wi-Fi to download a lot of pics for presentations in Eskişehir (Omangazi Üniverstesi) and Ankara (Hacettepe University). HEY! As long as I’ll be enjoying free Wi-Fi (if in fact all is functioning), I’ll share some of them with y’all. But for now, here’s a collage on my own dime (or kuruş, to be precise) – my apologies for its fuzziness:

If you’re curious about the technique, well, the most interesting part is all that scumbly stuff on the bottom – well, it’s the back side of a used band of gold leaf – the light yellowish part is where there is still leaf on the tape – but it is the reverse side, so it is not shiny – and all the darker colored stuff is actually the watercolor on the paper underneath – now visible through the transparent band in the areas where the leaf was removed (pressed into some mixed-media work, no doubt).

Well, I’ll be on the road in a couple of weeks, with stops in Eskişehir and Ankara.

It started out as a simple trip to hang the Eco-Siklet Traveling Design Exhibit at the Büyülü Fener cinema in Kızılay, but it seemed a long way to go just to hang an exhibit, so I got to planning, and now…

In Ankara I’ll be giving 2 workshops – a collage workshop on 25 March, and a notebook workshop on 26 March, both at the Faberge Cafe in Kızılay. If you’re interested, just click on the picture below for workshop details (in Turkish – or contact me via email for details in English).

In Eskişehir I’ll be giving a talk on “Words in/as Art” at Osmangazi University.

Today at the end of my ‘1-woman yoga class’, Tüğce (yoga teacher – so together we are a ‘2-woman class’) asked me where she could see some of my collages on-line – prompting me to get around to this post.

Rather than something new, the photos below are from an exhibit I organized a couple of years ago called “Vitrinler’de Sanat / Art Windows”. The idea was to put artworks in empty shops in Turgutreis – because at the time it seemed the empty shops outnumbered the full ones – which wasn’t doing much for morale, or for business.

The artwork ran the gamut from watercolor ‘scenes’ to a ‘dead fish installation’ by a ceramic artist… rather a nice variety, I might say. I had the window of a former greengrocers, so I decided to put in a basket of pomegranates.

(Recycled from a 2000 installation called “Nü-Nar (Nude Pomegranate) – but perfectly ‘suitable for audiences of all ages’ – with the ‘nü’s’ directed towards the inside of the shop.) Next to the basket was a “fruit pyramid”.

Another artist in the exhibit who works with paper is Uta Çiner.

It’s kind of hard to see what she was doing in there – so here’s another shot, of ‘the work’:

And I guess it’s still kind of hard to see exactly what this is: a very large papier mache sculpture.

To really see what she does, here is a link to her website, http://kikkula.de/, which shows work by Uta and her husband Tuna. I just went to visit them at their shop in Gumuşluk yesterday, to pick Tuna’s brain on books – he makes BEAUTIFUL notepads using a lot of SE Asian papers – and I got some good advice re: The Little Book of Pavement…

So, ideas from Tuna and a new ruler from Kadir, and we should be on our way…